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You know an article is going to be good when it starts with those lines:

Gamasutra wrote:

When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that.

Not only are the stories good, the comments below are pure gold:

Ken Demarest wrote:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

.. about the 3d game where "Damp" (the main character) kept falling through the floor because of round-off-problems in the geometry (a title converted from PC with high-precision floating points to PS1 with low-precision fixed point).